Stephanie Taylor's Narratives of Identity and Place released

Dr Stephanie Taylor’s book Narratives of Identity and Place has recently been published on Routledge. The book investigates the continuing importance of place for women’s identities, employing a theoretical and empirical approach based on previous work in narrative and discursive psychology.

Changes of residence are common in contemporary Western societies. Traditional connections to birthplaces, home towns and countries are broken as people relocate and migrate, yet where they live remains significant for their identity claims and stories of who they are.

Narrative analysis has become increasingly popular in British social research since the 1990s, but it continues to be eclectic. The narrative-discursive approach presented in this book focuses on both the (fragments of) life narratives which are speakers’ own constructions in talk, and the established narratives which are resources for that talk. Such narrative resources are normative, functioning for speakers not only as a possible shape for a life but also as an ideal against which success or failure may be measured. One important resource for identity work in relation to place is the ‘born and bred’ narrative which invokes the imagined continuity of long-term personal and family connection.

The narrative-discursive approach can explore the continuities in a speaker’s identity work, looking beyond the narrower focus on the immediate interaction which has characterized most work in discursive psychology. The book looks at continuity both as a construction in talk and as produced through local resources, including a speaker’s previous accounts (such as rehearsed stories and often repeated memories) which become local resources for a construction shaped to the current situation of telling.

Through an analysis of women’s talk, the book explores the persistence of tradition and also the new relationships in women’s identity work around place. It shows how a speaker’s multiple interpretations of where she lives remain central to the life narrative which she can construct for herself, retrospectively and prospectively, and to her fragile and idealized definition of ‘home’ as the place in which she may position herself positively.